


With the Desert

by Zirakinbar



Series: Star Wars & Star Wars Related Oneshots [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Language, Slavery, Tatooine, world-building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:01:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26327563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zirakinbar/pseuds/Zirakinbar
Summary: Anakin Skywalker is a child of the Force. In one reality he allowed his human flesh to bind him, to chain him into a being of blood and bone and limits.In this one he doesn’t.Shmi Skywalker’s son walks with the desert.
Series: Star Wars & Star Wars Related Oneshots [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1916962
Comments: 15
Kudos: 260





	With the Desert

**Author's Note:**

> Hover over words for translations (ish).
> 
> It's possible I've used the word desert so much it no longer makes sense to me.
> 
> Notes added to the end on translation as well to make it mobile-friendly.

Shmi Skywalker knows that her child is not normal.

She says that he has no father and the other slaves murmur but say nothing to contradict it. They know what that means in Tatooine – but no, she wants to tell them, it’s not that she was raped or drugged or desperately trying not to remember, it’s that there is _da tarɨ sheva , _no son’s father to be found. It is no less a violation of her self, but it is a sign, she thinks. Of what, she doesn’t know.

Her child grows within her and with him comes the dreams. Words echo in her mind: her child is _tahikjur rɨ , _the desert’s child, the _tazeulu rɨ , _the son of suns. She feels the _tashedhufi oba _rage with the breath of the _huba krayt_ behind it from miles and miles away and she knows in time that will be _her_ son breathing life into the _shedhufi _and directing the _zeoba_ , the sands, to do his will – she dreams of him standing in the eye, the sand grains whirling into a thousand million dancing pieces that break their rage upon the _zeosuli_.

She does not see then what he will become. She is too human to understand the nature of that which grows within her. She knows the desert and that is what he appears to her because the desert is the immortal, the infinite, the end that all beings, _zeredya_ and _zeosuli _alike, will walk into when their time comes. That is the way of Tatooine.

Sometimes the infinite minds her confines, becomes even smaller within her dreams and she sees beings passing their lives like the _zetogsi _scurrying beneath the sands at the merest glimpse of light. She sees Caahneh Sandrunner, the third generation Togruta _redya_ snarl and strike her _osuli_ – and be caught in a constellation of red drops that is all that is left of her when he presses the detonator in a rage. She sees Lim Cehu laugh and laugh and _laugh_ when they catch him too late to stop him from slipping _tasodzobrifson _into the dinner he was serving, his _osuli _and _taosuli idz _lying spasming in their own foam. (She doesn’t see his death in the sarlacc’s pit and she is grateful for that. She hopes he kept some of the _tasodzobrifson _for his own walk into the desert).

She sees her own _osuli_ , festering in the blackness of his own dual hearts and she wonders if she could just _reach out_ and-

Her _osuli_ Vor-al _oes hikjur _that night, goes into the desert, _dies,_ and she is put on the auction block seven months pregnant. Fat Gardulla’s steward buys her because the Hutt has need of a mechanic and Shmi Skywalker can make electronics breathe long past when their constituent parts have stopped pretending to be part of a whole.

She works to earn her water even as she swells with the last of her pregnancy. The dreams continue but that glimpse of power, of clenching her hand into a fist and feeling hearts _stop_ –

\- That does not come back. It is well enough she supposes. It is not yet time for the _tashedhufi oba _to claim the _zeosuli_. That time will come and it will be through _taShmi rɨ_. She may not have wanted the child forced into her body but she will glory in his victories nonetheless (and oh, her dreams have promised her bloody victories).

(She is surprised when her _rɨ _is born and he has two arms and two legs and two bright, bright blue eyes. She expected stars where flesh rests and it unsettles her in a way that she cannot explain. She names him _Anakin, Anas _for is or am, _ki _for the future and _n_ so that it is a name and does not draw too much thought. It does not make too much sense but _redya _names do not need to.)

* * *

The child, Shmi’s Anakin, grows in fits and starts. The others do not notice his differences and she wonders whether the _zeulu_ have burned so brightly as to blind them. When he speaks, it is not that he needs to learn but rather that language speaks through him. When he walks, it is that he has decided he has sat for long enough. He _wills_ and the world reshapes around him.

Shmi does not know when he first decided to watch her work, how he appeared beside her when she had left him with the other children. He watches her knit metal and electric together and he laughs as he reaches out to let the sparks dance through him as well. He is _izke e izak_ , Shmi’s Anakin, he is flame and fire and he is so real that he makes reality around him seem insubstantial.

( _How does no one see?_ )

The mechanics entertain him. In a world where life speaks and sings to him, the electronics are only on the cusp of _being_ and he hears them from the future not the current. They are the _mshki zeanas_ , the many will bes, and they are and are not in a way that fascinates him. He lets metal melt under his hands and reshape and reform into their potential, lets the electricity boil into them and if he lets another breath slip in, a hint of life where there had been rigid obedience… well, who is there to stop him?

When Anakin speaks of the future, he speaks of _mshki _only – none of the uncertainty of _eshki_ , only _mshki_ , it will be so and Shmi notes that it always is so.

* * *

They are lost – or won – in a sabacc game and Anakin smiles vaguely at his mother when she checks him over worriedly. What does it matter who thinks they own him? He is _tahikjur rɨ_ , and no _ osuli _can change his nature.

The little flittering Toydarian is pleased with his winnings and Shmi wonders if she could see within him, whether he would have the same black heart as Vor-al had. It seems likely. There are _da zeosuli skir , _no good masters, but the desert waits for them all.

* * *

Anakin is, perhaps, seven when Watto first seeks to punish him in a way that isn’t the slowly insidious punishment of water withholding (the water that for any other child would have been their lifeblood, but for Anakin is a pleasant thought and experience against his lips). He is angry because the hyperdrive is not fixed and because Anakin has spent the day watching the _shedhufi_ spin the sands through the streets of Mos Doba, some half a planet away.

The first blow of the _ges-_ stick Anakin allows to land and the experience of pain is a new one to him, an immediacy that he examines carefully and considers. It is Watto’s will that exerts over that first blow because Anakin did not know to will otherwise. When the Toydarian reaches back to bring the stick down again, Anakin considers whether he would care to feel it again and he decides that _no_ , he would not.

Watto thinks to harm him and Anakin thinks _not_ and between them there is only one will that is strong enough to determine both the current and the future. The blow lands on Anakin and the force of it snaps against Watto’s back and the Toydarian yelps. Anakin watches the skin turn a rapid, revelatory purple. Their eyes meet and then Anakin turns to walk away. The _shedhufi _has lost its strength in Mos Doba and the people are returning to work once again.

Watto lays down his _ges-_ stick with trembling hands. He does not pick it up again. No one can own the desert even when the sands are calm. Shmi watches and her eyes are dark with satisfaction. Let the _osuli_ know what it is to be subject to another.

* * *

When he is eight, Anakin _oes hikjur_. He goes not in the traditional sense on a sick bed and choking for his own breath, but by letting the _tashedhufi oba_ come into the streets of Mos Espa and walking out with it. He rides the breath of the sands until he stands in the desert and he is alone, gloriously alone. In one direction the Jawa wind their way to trade aboard their sandcrawler. In another, Sharad Hett joins the desert and his son A’Sharad picks his lightsaber up. It means little in the heartbeat of stars, but many things mean little.

Anakin lets the sands cascade through his hands and he thinks. The desert is the Tatooine of now and the jungles were the Tatooine of the past. The Kumumgah once tuned the trees into the singing of a vast network of supercomputers, the fuel for a burgeoning empire. They thought to take this and conquer – and the Rakata saw this and thought to conquer _them,_ to let their Infinite Empire demonstrate the foolishness of standing against their might.

The _huba krayt-arth_ might be the _osuli _of the canyon, but when it ventures out into the desert it is but a feast for its bigger brothers. So it was with the Kumumgah and the Rakata, and the Rakata chose to burn everything their prey loved about their world to glass – and in time, to sand.

The Rakata used the Force to twist everything away, to turn the array of valuable metals to corrosive acids, to change the very _nature_ of the world and leave it so that no one would bother to step foot on it ever again. Life is persistent though and there is always breath to be breathed. Tatooine is hostile, is unkind… but _mshkan _is _mshkan_ and the past is the past. Perhaps it is enough to let the winds bear away the corruption, to nudge those few seeds carried into new life and new forms. He does not need to grow jungle overnight. Tatooine will decide how Tatooine will grow. There is no future that he sees, but no future that he _does not_ see and he must now choose.

The sands come and the sands go and he contemplates the desert. A few weeks later he walks back into his mother’s home. Behind him he leaves a desert that is not the end but the beginning. There will be _angs _in time _, zeshedhufi _not of sand but of water, and he thinks that that will be good.

(The slave transmitter that should have bound him to Watto’s location? Well, that never mattered much to him.)

* * *

And then the Jedi come.

He had felt their type before, with Sharad Hett leading the Tusken wargroup, with his son A’Sharad. He has felt smaller flickers of them too, those not yet burning with _intent_ but still present and real, untrained and unaware

They land, not deep in the _hikjur_ but surrounded by the sands nonetheless. It is the steadiness of the flames within the ship that draw his attention, a tiny melody that winds its way through his consciousness, that leads him to breath out and _recognise_ them – and then, in curiosity, to reach out beyond the stars to sense their like singing on planets across the galaxy. He wonders if they are like him-

\- but no, there is no one like him.

* * *

Shmi watches with careful eyes when the Jedi come into Watto’s shop. Watto is loud and blustering and when the Jedi raises his hand he _flinches_ and she smiles that her son has trained him well. The Jedi’s trick does not work though and Watto is driven into a rage at the reminder of his own helplessness, furious and spitting.

Anakin comes out to watch them and Watto falls silent (in obedience? Perhaps.) The Jedi is drawn to her Anakin and she wonders – is _this_ one who will see? But there is interest in this Jedi’s eyes, not wariness and she realises that he is not the same as her _tahikjur rɨ_. He is the man who gathers sand into a pit and calls it tamed, not realising the desert beyond it.

So be it. She does not think the galaxy could survive more of her Anakin.

* * *

They would wander back out into the desert when the _shedhufi _rises and Anakin contemplates this. The flickers of life are… uninteresting on the whole, not worth the effort to exert his will over. The galaxy unfolds in centuries and stars, and yet-

He watches the woman-girl- _queen_ with eyes, not the Force for once. She is lovely, he thinks a little wistfully. She is lovely, and in one universe her children would be extensions of her and him, harmony in the Force. It is not so in this universe, because she is human, mortal, and she cannot touch the infinite. When he can feel the boundaries of her mind twisting and turning like a _togsi _scrabbling at its own tail beneath the sands… well, she is too small to contain his heart.

He lets them walk out into the desert, does not stop them, and turns his attention wider. There is chaos lurking in Tatooine and it is a wonderful contrast to the serenity of the Jedi. They balance each other as they should – order and chaos, stability and change. Perhaps he has been too peaceful in his movements, he thinks. The centuries are moved grain by grain, it might be so, but without that first breath there is nothing. Did he not realise that when he walked the desert? The infinitesimal has its purpose.

(The chaos rides out into the sands to meet its order, Jedi and Sith to match. The desert will claim who it will and perhaps the _shedhufi_ will claim the winner. In time all will walk with the desert.)

* * *

The Jedi and the Sith are gone now and he is the only Force in Tatooine, the only true Will in the solar system. Sometimes when he allows himself to stretch he hears their little songs winding away, order and chaos across the galaxy, but then he reminds himself of the _here and now_ , and reminds himself that he has his own song to wind into the futures.

(He forgets often, but that is not so bad. The Force is eternal and it will wait for him to bring his own mind around.)

And he realises – slow and creeping, but inexorable – that he is _Anas -ki-n_, _Anakin_ , and he is both the whole and the separate and he _may desire_. The Force is within him and beyond him and the movement of his soul but he may have will beyond the Force. It is hard, yes, to seize his attention from the whole and focus it _down_ but-

But-

But Watto thinks to strike Shmi Skywalker when her son does not walk near her and he stops and he thinks and he decides _no_. And before he has changed the world so that the action does not come to be, but now he is only a few miles away and he _looks_ at this Watto and he thinks-

_Why should the Force Will that you live?_

And-

_Why should I Will that that continues to be?_

And Watto’s heart is pounding too hard and the blood is flowing up and pulsing out out _out_ and he is choking and bleeding and the life ebbs out until his soul goes into the desert. There is panic at the body, noise on the street and someone thinks to point at Shmi and shout, to raise a blaster-

Shmi Skywalker walks home through a street of corpses. Her head is held high and she does not fear.

Anakin Skywalker is _tahikjur_ , but he is also _taShmi_. Perhaps it has taken him too long to realise this.

* * *

The rumours spread as rumours do. Shmi Skywalker walks untouched though the Hutts have named her dead to them and the bounty reaches higher and higher. The _zeredya _whisper among themselves of spirits and gods and perhaps the Hutts are not the only ones with gods now. The _shedhufi _whirls through the streets at night and the _zeoba _claim the _zeosuli _unwary enough to walk too close to one who is blessed.

Anakin watches the future sometimes, but more often he watches the now. The galaxy beyond edges on war, but why should he care for that? That is the dance of light and dark, of order and chaos, and he has no interest in their games – not yet. The sands of Tatooine prove enough for him as he sets the storms about his mother and still yet watches the desert as the delicate flowering of life continues to root in, as the faintest trickle of water winds its way out of the atmosphere.

Quantity is not value by itself, he thinks, and there is something precious in this tiny, worthless planet in the same way there was in mechanics and droids; the many will bes stretching out beyond the tiny ripples he sets.

And then-

-Then someone _calls_ him. It is as their master raises a vibro-whip, a whisper of _Anakin?_ in a voice that echoes like a bell through a thousand million murmurs that echo in the back of Anakin’s mind and Anakin _sees_ them.

One more grain in the wind. This twi’lek has no value, not really – but perhaps it is in the same way that this planet has no value.

One more walks with the desert that night.

It is not the _redya_.

* * *

_Mshki _is dragged into _mshker_ , future into present, step by step. The _zeosuli_ run hunted and the _zeredya_ have a name on their lips, bruised and battered and _triumphant_. Shmi Skywalker rests her hands on her son’s shoulders and smiles.

Anakin becomes himself. He is made through the whispers that drag him back from the infinite, through the pleas and the prayers that lead him to slowly trace out, thought by thought, what _he_ Wills.

He speaks still of _mshki_ , of the future, but it is no longer the _mshki_ of passive observation. This will be as he wills it to be.

* * *

He grows and he changes and he continues to become _Anakin_. The flowers that grow in the desert are no longer just the poisonous blooms of _tasodzobrifson_ , and the Tusken chitter among themselves at the changes that they see. The sacred waters continue to grow and cascade out and they decide that this means the gods are pleased with them.

Shmi watches him and watches the ways his shadow stretches beyond the flesh, how he stands so much more present than blood and bone. Now others see what she has seen. She wonders how far it will go.

* * *

The Hutts leave Tatooine. The _zeosuli_ flee. Now the _zeredya _must find a new name for themselves for there are no slaves in the desert.

Sometimes those ordered flames come back – the _Jedi_ , investigating the upheaval, driven by rumours of Sith that they chase across the galaxy. Anakin allows them to come but does not offer them more. He has no need of them.

Anakin starts to think of those worlds beyond Tatooine.

* * *

Ryloth is the first world beyond Tatooine that his name spreads to.

It is not the last.

* * *

And it spreads and it spreads and his name is spoken in whispers among those who have been broken and forgotten. The swell of the Force has forgotten them, but he is _Anakin_ and he does not forget them when they call on him.

And eventually there is a man in white armour, a man betrayed with his brothers lying dying and they have _no_ _one_ , so if this Anakin protects those with nothing, then maybe – maybe –

“ _Anakin,_ ” Rex whispers desperately. “If you can hear me, my brothers _please-”_

And Anakin hears him.

* * *

_Shmi Skywalker’s son walks with the desert._

**Author's Note:**

> da tarɨ sheva - da (negative) ta (of) rɨ (child) sheva (father) - _no father of the child_  
>  tahikjur rɨ - ta (of) hikjur (desert) rɨ (child) _desert's child_  
>  tazeulu rɨ - ta (of) ze (plural) ulu (sun) rɨ (child) _son of suns_  
>  tashedhufi oba - ta (of) shedhufi (storm) oba (sand) _sandstorm_  
>  shedhufi - _storm_  
>  huba krayt - huba (dragon) krayt _Krayt dragon_  
>  oba - _sand_  
>  zeoba - ze (plural) oba (sand) _sands_  
>  osuli - _master_  
>  zeosuli - ze (plural) osuli (master) _masters_  
>  redya - _slave_  
>  zeredya - ze (plural) redya (slave) _slaves_  
>  zetogsi - ze (plural) togsi (Tatooine native animal, like a vole; non-canon)  
> tasodzobrifson - ta (of) sodz (moon) ob (red) rifson (flower) _flower of the red moon_  
>  taosuli idz - ta (of) osuli (master) idz (family) _master's family_  
>  oes hikjur - oes (walks) hikjur (desert) _walks the desert, a euphemism for dying_  
>  taShmi rɨ - _Shmi's child_  
>  Anas - _is/am_  
>  ki - _future_  
>  mshki - msh (certain) ki (future) _will_  
>  eshki - esh (uncertain) ki (future) _might_  
>  kan - _past_  
>  mshkan - msh (certain) kan (past) e.g. mshkan oes _went_  
>  eshkan - esh (uncertain) kan (past) e.g. eshkan oes _may have gone_  
>  ker - _present_  
>  mshker - msh (certain) ker (present) _is_  
>  eshker - esh (uncertain) ker (present) _may be e.g. eshker oes may be going_  
>  izke e izak - izke (flame) e (and) izak (fire) _flame and fire_  
>  mshki zeanas - msh (certain) ki (future) ze (plural) anas (is) _plural 'will be's_  
>  da zeosuli skir - da (negation) ze (plural) osuli (master) skir (good) _no good masters_  
>  ges - _electric/electro_  
>  huba krayt-arth - huba (dragon) krayt (Krayt) arth (lesser) _lesser Krayt dragon_  
>  angs - _rain_
> 
> I think that captures all of it - let me know if I missed anything! General notes: no articles (e.g. the) are used; his or her is generally reflected by 'of someone' e.g. ta(name). Descriptions follow the noun. Time identifier goes before the verb which does not change.


End file.
